And we're back! ...Not much else to say, but I hope you enjoy! :) It's mostly exposition.
Also...oh dear. I have NO idea how tall Sally is. She's a bit shorter than Jack, but surprisingly almost as tall as him. But sadly there's no outlook as to how tall Jack would be if compared to a human. :( Plus her having an elongated neck adds to it. XD Henry is pretty tall, maybe a little over six feet...and maybe Sally approaches six feet?
To say that Henry was quite weirded out by everything was an understatement. You would think that even after the Hell he had gone through two years before, that by now, nothing would phase him. But oh, not at all. He was just as taken aback and put off like before.
Meeting Sally was only part of it.
Sure, he was a little more comfortable around her now, considering that despite her being a living, walking, breathing, life-sized, talking rag doll, she did come off to be more human and approachable. She wasn't one of Walter Sullivan's monsters, though at the same time, he wouldn't have been too surprised, given that she was a doll and had exposed, crude stitching on her body and her dress. Almost as if she was torn apart, and then sewed back together. Walter always did have a sick fascination with torture upon females, given his misogynistic tendencies, as well as torturing dolls and mannequins in the shape of females. It wouldn't have been entirely far-fetched.
However, he wondered just what Walter wanted with her. Was it because she was something of a manifestation of how he would treat a woman? Did she somehow do something to him? Was she one of his victims? Then why wasn't she a ghost? Or at best, a monster? That didn't make sense since none of the victims had her name or description.
Henry exhaled, and looked over at Sally, making sure she was all right. She looked terrified, and he could understand why. Even now, Walter Sullivan did not fail to horrify him completely.
"Are you okay?" He asked finally.
Sally nodded. "Yes...I'm all right. ...That was Walter Sullivan...I...oh...I saw him earlier...in the graveyard. I didn't even know that was him, and yet...I think deep down I may have known. He scared me...he was so creepy. Not the kind of creepy I know and am used to, either."
Feeling a wave of empathy, Henry gave a nod before responding. "I had the same experience when I first...really saw him. A part of me seemed to know, even if I couldn't say for sure."
"Oh..." She looked at him completely. "Henry, what does he want here?"
Sighing, Henry shook his head as he gently placed a hand on her shoulder. "I don't even know." He paused a moment, considering his question. "Did...anything around here...look really different to you?"
Sally nodded, biting her lip before answering. "Yes...I...ever since I...came out through that hole...everything was different. The graveyard... It looked different somehow. Everything. Almost as if someone painted different colours over it...it was infested with those...creatures... Nothing looked the same."
"That's what I thought... Walter did the same in the areas I went to back home." Henry explained. "South Ashfield station, the forest in Silent Hill, that...Water Prison, my apartment building, and then the hospital. Nothing about either of those places were normal, and they didn't look how I remembered them if I'd ever been there before." He looked behind them for a moment, and made a notion for them to keep walking along.
Sally followed alongside him, agreeing with his tactic. Staying in one place for too long would surely give the monsters vial time to catch up to them, if they were trailing them somehow. "Is...he doing this, then? How is it even possible?"
"I barely even know myself." Henry admitted. "I read a passage from the cult's bible once, though. It told about the Ritual of the Holy Assumption, and how it was a way of creating some kind of...other dimension. All I know so far is that the religious cult in Silent Hill, the Order, had some kind of way of bringing this nightmarish delusion around them. Some kind of mysterious power. ...And Walter brought that power to all of us. Using the cult's power to create his own Otherworld, how he views the world and its people. That's all I can really surmise about it."
That sounded pretty accurate, Sally guessed. Being in the graveyard, and out here in the Hinterlands, really did feel like she was walking into someone's own nightmarish visions of the places. It was completely unsettling, and even now with the possible knowledge, didn't help matters. She stuck closer to him as they walked along, her hands gripping the steel pipe even tighter.
Henry meanwhile, wasn't faring much better. He felt uneasy being around here. It almost felt as if he were in the forest outside of Silent Hill again. Except all of the trees were dead around here, and the ground was...strange, to say the least. It felt like a dead forest. He wondered how it normally looked without Walter Sullivan's "Otherworld" influence around it. Sure, he had been through this before, but it didn't fail to make him feel almost as he did before. Even if a bit more experienced.
Still, he vowed to protect Sally. She was clearly very scared too, and needed help in this. He just prayed with all he had, that nothing would happen to her. Human or not, she was counting on him. It almost reminded him of Cynthia, and Eileen.
"Henry... You...had also said in those...notes that a man named James Sunderland went missing in Silent Hill along with his wife..." Sally looked at him with curious worry.
Nodding, Henry ran his free hand through his scruffy hair. "Yeah...I did. Like I said in them, his father, Frank, was the superintendent of the apartment building. After Eileen and I moved out of there, I went back to see him and talk to him. I wish I had spoken to him before that whole ordeal, but I hadn't, especially when he gave me that painting I hung in the apartment. Anyway, his son James was around my age. He had a wife named Mary. Frank said the last he had heard, James and Mary disappeared in Silent Hill."
"...Oh..." Sally murmured in response, blinking. "This place...Silent Hill...sounds so dangerous."
"The town itself is okay, for the most part. It's a New England resort town." Henry explained. He could see she didn't understand. "It's the cult that's really bring it into Hell."
"You've been to Silent Hill." Sally said pointedly. "You said so in the entries."
Henry nodded once more. "Yeah. I went there as a kid, and sometimes years ago. I loved it there. It was a great place to go. I had pictures from there in my apartment. I'm a photographer, mostly working freelance."
"I see..." Sally looked around them, and came to see a wall that was built between trees. She frowned. She'd never been in the Hinterlands, let alone this far before, but she wasn't sure there were any kind of building structures out here.
Not only that, there was a message written in blood on it:
THERE WAS A HOLE HERE.
IT'S GONE NOW.
"What the...Hell?" Henry frowned toward the message, unsure of what to make of it.
"What is it supposed to mean?" Sally wondered.
"I don't know. It's probably just there to mess with us." Henry surmised. "...Sally, you said there was a hole in your room?"
"Yes...why?"
"Did you hear sounds coming from it?"
"I-I did...yes. I heard the incoherent sounds of children, and there was dripping, and wet sounds." Her brow furrowed a little as she bit her lip.
Henry considered it, and nodded in response. "I think...maybe they were...symbolized from the sounds of the children from the Wish House. ...And the Water Prison."
"You mentioned the Water Prison in your entries. That it was a water tower to the untrained eye, but inside...?"
This made Henry grimace. He couldn't easily talk about that place. When he'd gone in further and discovered more about it, that it was indeed a prison for the Wish House children, where they were tortured, kept watch over, and even killed, it was horrible to think about. "They kept the kids there sometimes. Under constant surveillance through these peepholes in the walls from the control rooms on every floor. As some kind of way to keep them in line and in submission. They were...tortured. And even killed. There were holes in the floor, in some of the cells."
"Holes in the floor?" Sally blinked, taking all of this in. She felt even more sickened by this.
"Yeah... They were...corpse disposal chutes." Henry grimaced as he explained this. "The second and third floor were actually able to be rotated, which had been a tactic used for the spotlight lights down below. They were align the rooms with bloody beds in order to line up the holes and use them as...corpse disposal chutes, like I said. Sometimes thanks to that, the doors would be locked and the kids would be..."
"...Trapped until they die?" Sally guessed in horror.
He nodded, and they stopped once more. Were those...tears? Yes. Sally began to cry then. Henry felt his heart drop. She must have really been so scared, and hearing about all of this was just killing her. While he didn't know her that well, he knew he couldn't just stand there like an insensitive jerk. He brought his arm around her, holding her close in a fairly awkward, one-armed hug as she cried into his shirt.
